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#1 I'd be looking at individual programs and agencies ie, DARPA, DIA, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), Army Material Command (AMC), and Army Research Lab (ARL) before personnel, but those are pet rocks with heavy Department of the Army feather merchant Civilian strengths which are difficult to cut.

If you can live without some senior grades, why the fok weren't they cut years ago. Sort of telling isn't it ?

Excerpt, which shows the numbers are actually quite small. They appear to be the cutting of positions, thence reductions through normal attrition and a suspension of hiring vs layoffs.

The Army would lose more than 2,100 workers from a 263,900-person civilian workforce, and the Navy would cut as many as 2,672 of 214,000 people. Department-wide agencies would dismiss 1,500 people from a projected 137,000-person force, with most coming from the Defense Contract Management Agency.

If you compare the ratio of GOs (general officers) to enlisted in WWII and today, you got to see its way out of wack. Grade creep has been a serious problem for generations. Part of the problem has been dealing with NATO, specifically their over ranking vis a vis personnel strength (high officer vs enlisted ratio). The American argument for too long has been we can't have someone of lower rank dealing with an allied counterpart who's two or three grades higher. Now that we're disengaging from that situation, the rationale no longer holds.

If you have a 100 GOs, its important to be a GO. If you have only 10 GOs, it becomes important to be a Colonel.

Anyways, these days, who needs more political appointees in uniform? /rhet question